We often have gone to the National Gallery when I visit you in London. I have this vivid memory of heading directly to your favorite Uccello painting, The Battle of San Romano. You admire his paintings. Why?

Uccello’s The Battle of San Romano at the National Gallery is about order from chaos so there is an obvious connection to my paintings. What Uccello has achieved in The Battle of San Romano is a fine balance of decorative complexity and geometrical order.Renaissance painters like him pioneered linear perspective and the systematic representation of light, shade and cast shadows, they were in their own precocious way in the businesses of plotting forms in space according to three coordinates. What is so interesting with this painting is that Uccello has most conspicuously not followed the logic of his construction is in the more distant landscape, in which scattered warriors indulge in various pre- or post-battle activities. He has combined his measured foreground stage with a landscape backdrop that functions well for pictorial purposes without attempting to establish any optically consistent relationship between them.I have always loved such carefully considered irrationality in paintings and thought, that only Asian art, with its non-western emphasis on the emptiness of the center does that.

I saw an interesting exhibition of paintings by Nicole Eisenman's paintings at the New Museum lately. Do you see a connection of her paintings with those of Philip Guston?

Her references are a deliberate part of her work; they include references to other painters as well. It is quite different to what Guston did .When I walk through Art Museums today, all the classical paintings have left their frames in a manner of speaking; they ,have come off the stretchers and are walking around to befriend people who come across them. There is a fluidity, but not the fluidity that is in my work. Eisenman's idea is about a fluidity that blends the past, present and future. Roberta Smith's article in the New York Times describes that very well.Young painters like Nicola Eisenmann are not bound by the old disciplines. They can pick any style from the archives, mix it up freely, and still come up with something meaningfully for a moment, or hopefully, for a while. The discourse of the avant-garde, or indeed any “ ism “, has been temporarily suspended for her generation. We had thought to stick with that and aim for the work to withstand time. They are admirably free, but on the other hand, I am quite pleased that my paintings start to feel timeless when they are only 20 or even 10 years old. I think it has to do with avoiding obvious, literal references. Rothko said: “The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.” What about you? To paint is a constant struggle. Any art is hard work, it only reveals itself with time. You have to believe in yourself, work hard and it will reveal itself – perhaps one sees that in Rothko's paintings.My paintings are not out to deliver a message, or to create a certain emotion, like a singer who provokes his/her audience to cheer or to cry. I was once hugged by a complete stranger after a presentation on my work. It came completely unexpected. You should never under estimate your audience.Personally I don’t feel the need to create a myth about the making of my paintings. People relate to my work, they live with it, it means something to them. Nobody has ever returned my work nor taken it to a second hand shop. I control the market.

You frequently mention chance. What part does it play into your work? Is this chance different from the chance in Pollock?

Jackson Pollock was a hard working painter and he had his compositions worked out in oil or acrylic and canvas several many years before he transformed his impulses into household paint drippings. The dripping of a common 20th century material, that you could find in any suburban garage, gave these carefully worked out compositions its kick to become the desperately desired all American art.It has never surprised my that he stopped painting those once he realized that he was being used by the art establishment. His compositions are in my eyes sometimes quite similar to battlepaintings like Uccello's you mentioned earlier. The movement of action painting that was so popular from 1940 to the sixties claimed to be painting from the unconscious. It was to get away from the narrow and firmly cemented definitions of painting aught to be. As Pollock had to move beyond what was given by Picasso, my idea of chance has to succeed that of Pollock. That’s the great thing in art. There is no competition. Competition is for horses. We are all just adding building blocks to a common language. Culture is a socialistic process.

Does your use of chance have any kind of structure? How did you come to adopt this particular way of painting, that is, of pouring color instead of using traditional painters tools of brushes.

My pouring of water and pigment has nothing to do with Pollock’s drippings or with Sam Francis splashing. The dripping evolved differently, since the challenges of the Abstract expressionists era was so different. When I lived in New Delhi, I wanted to become a political artist, because everything in India right now is political; the country is at that stage of shaping itself and reactionary force aspire to be middle class you need intelligent and imaginative people like artist to take responsibility.

It was the same in the US in the sixties. I admire the abstract expressionists because they moved us forward. Today we wrongly remember the sixties as the days of Andy Warhol but there were many political artists you pushed for new forms of expression. I hope to pass on the freedom that they gave me to younger artists. In our history art has more often been about empowerment than about commodity.

In employing chance into your painting, is its attraction that it becomes a challenge to your mastery?

It is the ultimate luxury, the ultimate goal. Maybe one should first say that chance has nothing to do with the stupidity of gambling, far from it. It is a really big force in the universe and not just an opportunity. To challenge your routine or your knowledge is only one of the things it does.When I was attending Yoga classes at the age of sixteen, one of the fellow yoga students invited me to an etching workshop at the contemporary art museum of my home town. It was run by an extraordinary young Japanese artist, he had landed in my home town completely by chance. His name was Fujio Akai; he had been to art school in Düsseldorf in the same year as Sigmar Polke , and was also a friend of Nam June Paik, so you can imagine, to cut a long story short, what he had to tell was far beyond the realm of my hometown. But he had landed there briefly because of the generous support of the museum director, who liked outsiders had provided for them a much-needed place.

Among the many astonishing things I saw and learned was Fujio’s ability to treat us students and myself, a mere teenager, with a form of respect that I had not encounter before. I knew parental care and the compassion of friends and being in love, but respect until then was always connected to a deed and mostly given to achievements. So why did this artist treat us like equals when clearly we were not. He was taking a chance that what might turn up to come in the future, might be bigger than what we could see that very moment.

A few years later I accompanied him to Brussels where Fujio met an old aristocrat he knew though mysterious circumstances, who was interested to buy some of his paintings. We met a very graceful man with an astonishing history who had passed on most of his possessions, among them van Goghs and Cezannes. We visited him in his apartment, which in contrast to his aura, was no doubt a humble understatement of some sort. On the Chinese sideboard (a present of the last emperor of China to his father) were placed three cups of Nescafé. A wonderful invention, as he put it, so simple and direct. Having had servants all his life he had never learned to make coffee himself.

This man studied the group watercolors that Fujio had brought to him closely, and after about an hour passed Fujio an envelope, which obviously contained money as a payment for the painting. Fujio started to wrap the paintings up again, when he said: “ No need to leave them here with me, my young friend, I have now seen them., you can take them with you again.“ We went for lunch with Marcel Broodthaers’s daughter or niece, who asked for his advice on an exhibition. Afterwards, we drove back to Düsseldorf with the paintings and the money.

The message from the afternoon was that actual possession, even paintings, do not automatically mean much, but instead every second that you see or experience matters more. No doubt, that man had experienced an excellent education all his life. He could not make coffee but his perception had become very refined. For me it meant that one could take the chance to leave things behind. Once you have consciously seen them, their essence becomes a part of you. This was the second experience of what you might call “chance “for me. Hopefully this principle applies when I put another layer of paint over the first one. The marks emerge additively, they may be cancelled out, by layering or opaque paint, but never truly eliminated. They are still present in a mysterious way. In the paintings there is addition but not subtraction.

Don't you think that chance is a risky search?

Is chance risky? It does not really present itself as a matter of choice to me. I always have to take a chance so as to not get stuck and shrivel up. I paint to survive. Stagnation and the death in the idyllic standstill happens by itself. It does not mean that you start to like your pain. Psychoanalysis mixes with art as well or as bad as art and science. Its more about seeing the opportunities where you can challenge the status quo.When I was at the Düsseldorf Academy of Modern Art, Josef Beuys was at the height of his career as the ideal post war artist of Germany. His work was about healing those war wounds and extending avant-garde art into a more holistic, political direction. He had become a international super star but still insisted to sign anything and everything. Any object that he was asked to signhe did, or that he felt worthwhile simply to deflate the signature cult of the artist. I wonder how many people remember this gesture. I think I still have a box of roof nails with his signature, but maybe it burned. Today there is so much insecurity that we have too many celebrity artist. We seek opportunities and forget to look for chance. Taking a chance is taking a chance to fail and seeing value in failing. This has always been part of our culture. I do it in every painting and I hope I am not getting to good at it. Every last gesture on paper is a possibility for the painting end in the bin. There is never any security, no stable income, and no certain future. Just the chance of the moment. This causes the concentration, they are what they are. Clever metaphors are as impossible as strategic thinking.Chance and opportunity are two different things. A long time ago when I first came to London I sat next to a man in the French House (a pub in Soho), and much to my surprise, he was no one less than Francis Bacon. Here was my opportunity to ask all the questions I always had about his paintings. But it was not a real chance, so we talked about red wine. It was his monologue really, what did I know about wine.

We can find evidence of chance in eighth century Chinese painting; their comments show they "intended the unintentional." Teachings of Taoism led some Chinese artists to believe that chance images could be better explained as symbols of the artist's harmony with the cosmos.

There we go, that’s what I tried to say in the interview. But 1200 years further we have not come very far. I better get back to painting. The unintentional has many words. You could call it mystery, for example. In a world where everything has to be intentional because we are obsessed with ourselves and with accountability, the force behind the unintentional is not easy to explain. There are no gods anymore that we can blame or praise nor does science form a big enough platform for our understanding. Practical and technical solutions are strangely unsatisfying. Information is produced while wisdom is neglected. The reverse makes up an obvious choice: Art, the unintentional knowledge

How would you define visual truth or falsity?

To dance is to pray and to pray is to heal, Native Americans say. I painted a lot of paintings and each one is different enough so that I cannot accuse myself of repertoire art. But to define visual truth is an endless journey I am afraid. To heal from the falsity we are surrounded by is the more daily struggle.If you do not strive to find visual truth in every moment you are clearly after something else.That’s why it may not be a matter of choice really. You might be after money or popularity, in which case falsity might be easier and more pleasant. Truth is hard work and exhausting because it involves failure.I remember well how difficult art had become when it was just conceptual or abstract. Than in the eighties artist came along who did not care about the rules and started to paint like expressionist again. Personal ambition and popularity go a long way. Was it all falsity because it was built on something that was thought of and expressed long before?Is it falsity if artist from India or China use the language American art of the 70 ties and mix it up with ethnic topics to make it look, as the newfound identity?Is this what drives your art or your looking at art, to find visual truth? I am sure it is, that is why we are talking. But there is a lot of decorative value in art and also a lot of trophy value, if you have enough money to spend. The keywords there are elegance and value, or even intellectual satisfaction, not truth.In documentary photography and film there is also the burden of visual truth. The terms visual truth or falsity are much easier to discuss in photography. In painting we deal with falsity from the start because we have empty piece of paper in front of us. I get to a certain truth by working myself through the falsities. Sometimes I leave them because they are part of the real world we live in. They are the elements where the balance tips over into kitsch. We are surrounded by such visual absurdities. There is a brown kitsch and a pink kitsch. Basically kitsch is an imitation of a real emotion. You can have that on both sides, meaning the dark colours can pretend in just the same way as the bright colours are. It is not just pink anymore. Look how the black and white photography is used as the ideal non committed decoration everywhere.The best key to define visual truth may be to place certain questions in various contexts and see how they stand up. That’s how I hang, or imaginatively hang, my work. Mentally I take them with me to the National Gallery and hang them next to paintings I admire. Increasingly, they started to hold their ground, while others do not, so I have to look again to see what went wrong. I hate to lose a painting. There is always a message there that’s worth while.Meaning can come either from the outside, or from everything being right- marks, colors, empty space, etc. – so that it looks as if everything is meant to be. The meaning than is in the right relationship. Sometimes the meaning only reveals itself in a particular context.Visual truth however defines itself through the paradox of a description without object, or place, even though there are things you see. You work to reveal it but it comes from the inside.I am moved that the same principles seem to work regardless if its the “Man with golden helmet” or Barnett Newman’s “Who is afraid of red, yellow and blue”. These masterpieces are half dead but they still hold truth.

You said you paint for beauty and for hope. What is beauty?

There are so many beautiful people, beautiful landscapes, objects, moments. There is far more than we can hold.The key is to step back and not to be afraid, to let beauty approach you. I stop painting when the piece of paper has reached an active form of beauty. The beauty of a person is her/his character. The beauty of an endless beach or the breath taking beauty of mountains is in the moment when we see it. The beauty of objects is in our appreciation and this appreciation is shaped differently in every culture.Two things strike me as important today. Trust and time. If you don’t see any beauty you are very likely to be short of one or the other or both of these qualities.What we often mistake as beauty are simple codes of aesthetic on the surface. Such as certain orders and proportions. These aesthetic attractions however do not last very long even if the come in duck session. I am not sure how you overcome the problem of deceptive and seductive proportions. The problem of avoiding the comforting structure of order is a lot easier as they come from childhood. They have both a positive reassuring quality as well as a disturbing claustrophobic one. As much as I love my home town, and the kind supportive people there, all that intellectual German rigour to surge for the right or the wrong left me breathless as a child. It was only at the edge at the sea, or high in the mountains when we were on holiday, that I could breath. For me beauty was always connected to this ability to breath. Places like NYC are hundreds of times tougher than any German city, but the tolerance you see in NYC streets, such as in the vibrant mix of people, creates space to able to see beauty. So beauty has to do with diversity. Homogeneity is its opposite.There is, of course, a third reason why we cannot see beauty. It could be that it does not exist, or is deliberately hidden. If the expression does not reveal itself; if the work of art gives you all kinds of metaphors and not revealing anything beyond such metaphorical meaning, it might not have any beauty.I think there is another meaning in works of art other than metaphorical meaning. It is in its direct vibrancy, without being vibrant. Of course it helps when you know where its coming from, otherwise you may misinterpret certain effects. But I have also had plenty of experiences where people had no interest or intention to know anything about the amount of work that went into the painting. They simply feel something, something shines through. The complexity of hiding and simultaneously revealing, is a sensual dance in which the painter allows the viewer to be taken in by the painting. Turner is a master of this in some of his paintings but so is William Kentridge and many others of course. Beauty can be very strange.In my case it is not beauty that is strange but strangeness that can be beautiful.It would be sad if what people feel is very different from what I expressed. My paintings translate, if the meaning changes in the translation, I did not do a good job but than again all translations are temporary. I am always very moved when viewers of a much younger generation see the beauty in my work. It must have a completely different meaning to them and yet they see the honesty of my approach. There seems to be a certain shared understanding of genesis. It is beauty we have all experienced when we made our first mark as a child. Here I am.

Is it the purity of expression, where art has no function other than to be transformative, creating an individual aesthetic experience, or the beauty of revealing some element of hopefulness?

Hopefulness and beauty are connected, at least I hope they are. In other great works by another artist it might not be an issue, or at least not so obvious. Although if you look a bit closer, it is often is. Being critical, sensing the apocalyptic and uncovering it through art, is the more common expression that artists are appreciated for. I can see why but in my years as an art activist, I found it self defeating that if you only show such political statements in art galleries, then you are preaching to the converted. It happened in the 60ties. Somehow I can’t help but shiver when I see a Jenny Holzer in a lobby of a Wall Street bank, or Tillmann’s poster against the Brexit at a gallery in Chelsea, or an art fair in Berlin, rather than on billboards in the right wing ghettos of little England. Look how Mr. Bansky became Mr. nice guy. Popularity definitely has its price. Society absorbs protest, first it is art, and than it becomes culture, and than a commercial commodity. When you are working politically you have to create a sustainability of your argument. I think it’s a shame that so few artists see how important they are in this.But your question was about hopefulness. The hopefulness I am talking about is not one which aims towards a goal. It is more the process of uncovering.

What are you trying to uncover? Yourself?

No that would be too easy and an exercise for a psychiatrists. I am trying to uncover the cultures and atmospheres, the people I feel drawn to. Art translates, which makes the viewer such an important part for me. What I see travels on in a changed and hopefully clearer format. I try to uncover the things I saw and felt. That is how I was brought up. It sounds analytical but it had an important twist. My art teacher sad us on the cold marble floor in the museum when we were kids and explained the Max Beckmann paintings and many other great works of art. It was a shocking revelation, a first hand and definitely physical experience not a schoolbook exercise. He established the benchmark. Art as a mental exercise could never be enough from than on. It had to be real, sensual and a counterpart to yourself.